My recollection of the 2009 survey "The Pictures Generation" at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art had it - erroneously - including Eric Fischl. But then, the show was organized by the Met's photography department, which might have considered Fischl too much a painter.

"Dive Deep: Eric Fischl and The Process of Painting" at the San Jose Museum of Art makes a case for Fischl as a painter long fascinated by social conditions that gripped "The Pictures Generation" - anxiety over the collapse of conventions and institutions, the blurring of gender and other pegs of identity and opportunism supplanting idealism, all roiled by tidal waves of mediated images.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia originated the Fischl show. Superficial affinities between Fischl's art and Bay Area Figurative painting may explain its presentation here.

A little older than some other luminaries under the "Pictures Generation" rubric, such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, Fischl rose to prominence among them.

Although Fischl always put painting foremost, he had gone to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, a school known, especially in the 1970s, as a hotbed of socially critical conceptual art. And his work was frequently linked with that of David Salle, who was counted among "The Pictures Generation" and who also traced his paintings to photographic sources.

"Dive Deep" will surprise some visitors who think they know Fischl's work because it includes so many of the photographs he has taken - and in recent years Photoshopped - to germinate drawings, paintings and prints.

The selection of works, many lent by the artist, usefully traces the passage of a female beach bather at St. Tropez from photographs through various studies into graphics and painting.

No sooner has the viewer thought of Edgar Degas' practice of tracing, transferring and recombining the figures of ballet dancers in his late pastels than a wall label makes the connection explicit, quoting Fischl on his admiration for Degas.

The small bronze sculptures also will surprise viewers who have not followed Fischl's work closely. They clearly suggest as precedents the clay sculpture by Degas posthumously cast in bronze.

I have always seen Fischl's art foundering on the tension in it between the fabrication of an image and its use to fabricate intrigue.

The exhibition tells us almost more than we care to know about Fischl's working process. It sometimes involves so many stages that the climactic work seems an awfully small payoff.

The 6-by-9-foot painting of novelist Richard Price and family shows Fischl's hand at its most relaxed - something we see more frequently in small works rehearsing big ideas. He evokes daylight, demeanor and an uneasy family dynamic with striking economy and credibility.

An adjacent wall full of Fischl's doctored and unaltered photos of the foursome seems to corroborate his decisions about how to compose the finished picture.

But it leaves unanswered the question of why to paint these images when the camera and computer already accomplish so much. Fischl's answer seems to be his confidence that passing these frozen and sometimes scrambled figments through his own hand and nervous system will extract from them a human truth - or intrigue - otherwise unavailable, or felt only inauthentically.

One of the most ambitious projects represented in the show, the series titled "The Bed, The Chair, The Sitter," like the technically similar "The Krefeld Project" (2002), involved Fischl hiring models to improvise scenes and poses in a chosen environment to generate a sort of storyboard without fixed narrative.

But when the upholstery in a painting - see "The Bed, The Chair, The Sitter" (2000) - upstages the sputtering narrative, the painter's judgment comes into question. So seductive are the wound-like red brushstrokes defining the pattern on a pair of white slipper chairs, that admirers of painting as a performance will wonder why Fischl requires such elaborate stagecraft to let his hand go.

That question, which "Dive Deep" cannot answer but the viewer takes away, eclipses all the more obvious mysteries that Fischl contrives.